


THE BEST BEE FIC EVER

by sanguinity



Series: THE BEST BEE FIC EVER [1]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Bees, Crack, Curtain Fic, Deliberate Bad Art, Deliberate Badfic, EMPRESS OF THE BEES, F/M, FOURTH WALL WHAT FOURTH WALL, Joan is, The Joan Watson Fanclub, but still a gazillion times better than anything made by a tortoise or a RABID ELEPHANT, but still better than most of what you'll find out there, by which I mean, especially Mycroft, hahahahaha, rocks fall and Mycroft dies, season two fix-it, seriously this is the best bee fic ever you should totally read this right now, speciation totally works that way, which makes it a happy ending for everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 01:48:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 6,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3632058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You named a bee after me? You named a bee after me.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Should be dozens more within the hour. If you like, I can come and get you once they’re all here. </i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>That’s all right. I think I’ll just watch.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>[BLOODBATH ENSUES]</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1: Hemolymph

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badficromance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badficromance/gifts).



> > [ **Please note:** this was written for Bad Bang IV, which means it was written without regard to restraint, decorum, plausibility, wordcraft, or whether y’all would still respect me in the morning. I hope y'all enjoy it anyway.]
> 
>  
> 
> Dear badficromance,
> 
> You requested [curtain!fic from the pov of a swarm of bees, but without too much plot](http://badficromance.dreamwidth.org/430.html). Happily for you I know what I’m doing, and so I included EXACTLY THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF PLOT. You also asked for Joan/Sherlock, no gen, which was a stupid request because everyone knows JOANLOCK IS PLATONIC, even Bob Doherty says so. But whatever, I’m a good enough writer that I made your dumb request work anyway.
> 
> Love always,  
> Your Honey Badger
> 
> P.S. no bees were eaten in the writing of this fic  
> P.P.S. or in the making of the art

It was a bloodbath.

Or rather, a hemolymph-bath. Sherlock was very clear about that later, as he mourned the demise of his favorite mellifera colony: bees do not have hemoglobin blood. They have hemolymph blood.

So it was blue-green hemolymph everywhere, dripping down the comb, contaminating the honey and pollen stores, and accumulating in a spreading puddle on the hive floor, as the adults of the new species emerged and began taking on the _Apis mellifera_ nurse bees, ripping their heads from their bodies as they went. One by one, they took over the newly-vacant nursery jobs, moving through the combs and systematically destroying the purebred _Apis_ eggs and larvae, sparing only the _Apis x Osmia_ crosses.

Or as Sherlock had named them: _Euglossa watsonia_. Perhaps he would have done better to name them: _Watsonia hemolymphbathia_.

Joan and Sherlock raced to slide back the glass when they realized what was happening, hoping to manually separate the _watsonia_ from the _mellifera_ , or at least give the _mellifera_ a clear path to escape.

Instead, the new bees went straight for Joan herself. Sherlock shouted in panic and lunged for his smoker, but the bees only neatly circled Joan, orbiting her like tiny buzzing golden asteroids.

Ms. Hudson, who had come up to the roof during the disturbance, gasped. “Joan, you’re royalty!”

The bees were, in fact, making a golden circlet around Joan’s head.

“Watson is remarkable in all ways,” Sherlock scoffed, “but you may have noticed that she is a Watson, not a Stuart. And while coronation by bee makes at least as much sense as the current scheme, bees have nothing to do with systems of human governance, obsolete or otherwise.”

Ms. Hudson curtsied deeply to Joan. “Ah, but bees have been in the king-making business ever since they protected the baby Jupiter, king of the gods. And Napoleon became emperor by the power of the bees.”

“Stop,” Joan said, holding out her hands to both of them. “I am not a goddess nor an empress! I am just Joan Watson, Consulting Detective.”

Ms. Hudson merely smiled. “The Oracle at Delphi listened to the bees, Joan. You should, too.”

“Oh, the Delphic Oracle!” Sherlock rolled his eyes. “She’s doing raging business nowadays, I understand.”

“Bees never lie,” Ms. Hudson said serenely. “And neither do autodidact Greek scholars.”

“Herodotus, on the other hand, was a regular Pinocchio,” Joan said. “I’m not sure how much faith we should be putting in the ancient Greeks, here.”

“My point exactly,” said Sherlock.

But the honor guard encircling Joan’s brow never strayed from their path.


	2. Empress Joan

_What a dump_ , the bees buzzed, when they saw Joan Watson’s room for the first time. Her honor guard broke from their positions and flew to investigate the room thoroughly. _It’s a disgrace, it’s like she never moved in properly!_

The idea that their human empress might consider this place temporary filled them with dread. The newly-emplaced watsonia nurse bees had built emergency queen cells from some of their larval sisters, but it would be weeks before the new queens were ready to swarm. Until then, the _Euglossa_ colony was bound for its survival to the nuc hive that Sherlock had moved them into in a desperate bid to save his _mellifera_ queen. If Joan Watson were to move away from the brownstone before the colony was ready to go with her, the new colony would die.

 _We must make her stay!_ the bees buzzed.

 _We must make her **want** to stay!_ more bees buzzed back.

As one, they flew to the open window and scoured the streets of Brooklyn, looking for materials worthy of their empress.

“These are beautiful,” Sherlock said, agog with wonder, when Joan called him into her room to see. The bees buzzed unhappily: they had not built these masterworks for the pleasure of Joan Watson’s drone.

“Aren’t they, though?” Joan said, brushing her fingertips over one of the new combs. The bees had tinted the wax substrate to a regal purple and indigo, and then finished the look with flower petals, each intricately lapped over the others into swirling patterns of color. “I’ve never seen anything so gorgeous.”

[](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7619/16955360182_7438064fd8_o.jpg)

The bees buzzed with joy. _Joan Watson approved of their work!_

“Wax comb and flower petals both as building materials,” Sherlock murmurred. “A true cross of _Apis_ and _Osmia_. I never imagined.”

“I’m worried, though,” Joan said, and the bees’ hum rose a notch in anxiety.

Sherlock tilted his head, listening to their sudden agitation. “About what?” he asked. “And perhaps you should worry more quietly, you seem to be upsetting the bees.”

Joan frowned. “I’m worried they’re splitting their resources between here and the roof. It’s such a young colony, it doesn’t even have a queen yet, can it afford to be doing that? Perhaps we should bring their nuc down here, if this is where they want to nest.”

The bees buzzed with euphoria. _Joan Watson cared about them and their welfare! She wanted her bees to be near her!_

Sherlock heard the change and stared hard at the bees, watching them alight and taste her skin, before relaunching themselves to orbit her again.

“I’m happy to let them have this room, if they want it,” Joan continued, unbothered by the repeated light touch of the bees against her skin. “You had been planning to make it into an apiary anyway, and there are plenty of other empty rooms I could move into.”

It took the bees a moment to understand what they had heard -- _it could not be!_ \-- and then they roared with sudden despair. The flew at their newly-built comb, ripping petals free from the wax. _Their empress did not accept their offering after all!_

“Oh, no!” Joan gasped, watching the destruction. She put out a hand to the comb, trying to protect some of the bees’ delicate work from their frenzy.

Sherlock ducked away from the distressed bees, which were zooming dangerously near his face. Flower petals showered gently around him. “Is moving out what you want?” he asked urgently. “Because I don’t think the bees want to be in this room, per se. I think they perhaps want to be in _your_ room.”

The bees on the comb paused in their demolition, waiting on Joan’s answer. One by one, more of her honor guard alighted on the comb, until the room was completely still.

Joan held out a finger near the comb. Docilely, a bee stepped onto her finger. Up close and still, the gold of its body gleamed iridescently.

“I…” she said, momentarily at a loss for words. “I don’t mind sharing,” she said at last.

Despondently, a nearby bee tore another petal from the comb.

“I mean, if they want me,” she continued, and a quiet hum of hope filled the room. “They’re beautiful and amazing, and they have the sweetest temperaments I’ve ever seen.”

Sherlock snorted from his crouch on the floor. “My _mellifera_ hive would beg to differ.”

“Oh, but they didn’t mean to,” she cooed at the bee on her finger. “They were young and scared and outnumbered.”

The bee on her finger twitched her wings in indignation. _They certainly had meant to! But if Empress Joan didn’t like it…_

“I’d be happy to share with them,” Joan said, her voice honey-sweet with indulgence. “I’m sure they’ll be no trouble.”

“I’m sure they’ll be nothing _but_ trouble,” Sherlock said, as the bees happily took wing again, gathering the scattered petals from the floor, and industriously putting their comb to right. “But I’ll suit up and bring their nuc down from the roof, if that’s what you want. Or perhaps you should do the honors. You’ll need to learn beekeeping, seeing as you seem to have acquired a colony of bees all of your very own.”

“We’ll have to build some sort of passage for them through the wall,” she said. “The window is fine for now, but I can’t leave that open year-round. And maybe we should put in a flower garden on the roof. Your bees live on sugar-syrup, but if mine are using petals for construction...”

Sherlock nodded. “We’ll make some test plots, see what they like best.”

The bees hummed their approval. Test plots would be very useful for discovering what Empress Joan liked best. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Grrlpup for the art!


	3. Chapter 3

“Oh, Joan, I’m so glad you’re back!” Ms. Hudson greeted her on the brownstone stoop, and enveloped her in a hug. “How was London?”

“I have no idea, I hardly got to see any of it,” Joan said, with a wry glance over her shoulder at Sherlock. A bee nosed at her hair, and darted away again.

“Ms. Hudson,” Sherlock greeted her, carrying Joan’s flight case up the steps.

“Oh, don’t be like that, of course I’m glad to see you, too, Sherlock. But the bees have been utterly despondent without Joan. I’ve hardly known what to do with them.”

There was a low, distant hum, as if an AC unit had turned on in a neighboring brownstone, and all three humans cocked their heads to listen. The hum grew louder, and Sherlock set Joan’s case down at the top of the steps, then jumped the stone balustrade to the sidewalk below. Ms. Hudson retreated into the brownstone, firmly shutting the door behind her. The air around Joan suddenly filled with bees.

“Shh, my pretties,” she whispered to them, standing still so as not to accidentally crush one. They were flying very close to her, briefly touching down on her hair or hands before taking off again. “I’m sorry I went away, but I’m back now. I brought you a present,” she wheedled, holding a bouquet of hothouse flowers out into the golden swarm. “Organic, I promise. No pesticides, no GMOs.”

The bouquet grew heavier with the weight of bees landing on it, and then the swarm around Joan rapidly began to thin.

“You can come out now, Ms. Hudson,” Sherlock called, coming up the steps again. “The bees have dispersed!”

Ms. Hudson opened the door. “You can see how they’ve been, Joan! They’ve-- Oh, your poor flowers!” The blossoms were ragged, the bees having removed a number of the petals in part or entire.

“They were for the bees in the first place,” Joan laughed. “I’ll just take them upstairs so they don’t have to carry the petals so far.”

Ms. Hudson took her hand and drew her through the entry, toward the staircase. “I was going to say, you should see what they did to your room!”

The combs themselves had not changed much in Joan’s absence -- parallel ridges of multicolored wax and flower petals built into the corners and crannies of the otherwise-bare space -- but the blank wall next to Joan’s bed had been covered in a flat coat of monochrome yellow. The flower petals had been artfully aligned and lapped, producing a variety of textures on different parts of the wall. Joan felt there was almost sense to it, but couldn’t make it out.

“Hmm,” Sherlock said, and left. Two minutes later he was back with a digital SLR. “This is crude,” he explained, as he fiddled with the camera’s settings, “I don’t have the precisely correct selection of lenses and filters, and of course color perception is far more complex than a naive record of wavelengths, but as a starting point… Yes.” He tilted the camera’s screen to show Joan and Ms. Hudson.

The camera revealed the wall as a ten-foot tall portrait of Joan. The focus was wrong and the colors strange, but it was recognizably Joan.

“How…?” Joan asked, looking back at the blank yellow wall.

“Ultraviolet light. This isn’t precisely what they see, of course, but it does give an idea. It seems they are more attached to you than any of us realized, Watson.”

“So clever…!” Ms. Hudson breathed, looking from camera to wall.

“More than clever, amazing,” Joan corrected.

The bees’ hum swelled with joy until it filled the room like the purr of ten-thousand self-satisfied cats.

 


	4. Interlude

Face-to-face with Moriarty’s _pièce de résistance_ , Joan laughed with derision. Sherlock had spent weeks in her room with an ever-more-elaborate battery of journal articles, spectra analyses, lens filters, and photoshop manipulations, trying to do justice to her bees’ creation. He finally, triumphantly, had presented to her his best approximation of what her bees had made: a pointillist masterpiece, in colors never seen by the human eye.

After that, mere classical realism -- in _acrylic_ , no less -- had no capacity to impress her.

“I’ve had better,” Joan smirked.

Moriarty flushed in sudden anger.

“For that matter, I’ve had bigger, too.”


	5. Chapter Four

Sherlock’s relationship with Joan’s bees was alternately peaceable and rocky. Most times they were content to ignore him, quickly scenting his jacket and hair whenever he returned to the brownstone before returning to their business of the moment. Sometimes they would even go so far as to seem to enthusiastically welcome him into the room-cum-hive they shared with Joan.

Sherlock would not normally be so foolish to bring sweet foods within any distance of a working hive, but he made an exception for Joan’s bees, placing a small dish of jam or honey for them on Joan’s tray during his early-morning breakfast forays into her room. She would put the sweet offering aside for them while she ate, sometimes tipping a little of her orange juice into the bowl for them. Some of the bees would feast on the jam and juice, stockpiling it into their comb to make fruit-scented honey, while more bees would circle behind Sherlock’s back, not-so-subtly crowding him farther into the room and closer to Joan.

Likewise, Sherlock took to spending more of his sleepless nights in the chair beyond Joan’s bed: being enveloped in the busy workings of a hive was far more calming than merely sitting in front of one. Joan teased him that the bees would start encasing him in propolis with how long and still he sat in that chair, but he only flicked her teasing away, drifting in the neither-here-nor-there trance that her bees induced in him. For their part, the bees seemed to approve of his presence: they stuck his chair to the floor with a thick layer of propolis, and then encased the chair’s joints with the same, ensuring that his chair would never creak and groan in the night under his weight, accidentally disturbing Joan’s sleep.

But it wasn’t all a pastoral idyll. There was the day that Sherlock and Joan stomped and raged at each other from the first floor to the kitchen, and Sherlock shouted, “We did not have _this_ yet! You were new!”

Ignoring the rising murmur of her bees, Joan shouted back, “Even if I were to concede that, we have ‘this’ now, and you still let me work this ‘Tony from Long Island’ case like a complete fool!”

“I wasn’t _letting_ you do anything, I was trying my damnedest to keep you from wasting--” Sherlock shouted, and Joan’s bees descended on him. The rest of his reply was lost in shrieks of pain.

“Goddamn it, get off him!” she screamed at her bees, and ran for one of the many smokers that Sherlock had insisted in keeping in the brownstone as a precaution. “This is between him and me, and I was handling it just fine!”

When she had finally calmed her bees, she sat Sherlock down at the kitchen table and scraped the stingers out of his face and neck and hands, one by one. “I’m sorry that you got stung,” she told him when she had finished the job, “but you’re not having an allergic reaction, and I can’t even look at you right now,” and she walked out of the brownstone.

It only took a few hours for her to return, but it was weeks before the bees mellowed toward him and allowed him back into ‘his’ chair again.

He similarly got himself stung again over the nanotyrannosaurus case. “Watson! I demand that you get your bees under control!” he insisted, bursting into her room during the dark hours of the morning. He immediately yelped and retreated back to the hallway again.

Joan sat up blearily in her bed. The bees were agitated, although if they hadn’t been before, his banging her bedroom door open in the dark would have been enough to upset them. “It’s the middle of the night! What are you doing that the bees are even awake??”

“Nothing! I am trying to work the case, and your bees insist on interfering!”

“What case?” she asked, becoming rapidly more awake. “Wait, is this the _Doug Newburn_ case?”

“Yes!” he shouted back.

“The Doug Newburn case, one of the cold cases you gave me as an _apology_ for _stealing cases_ from me? What the hell, Sherlock?”

“There are no my cases nor your cases, Watson, only--” He cut off abruptly with another yelp, and then there was a frenzy of slapping sounds.

“God damn it, Sherlock, you know better than to swat at them.” She heaved herself out of bed, stalked out to the hall and grabbed his elbow, then dragged him down the landing to the bathroom and shoved him inside. He immediately tried to come back out, but she shoved him back in. “Wash those alarm pheromones off yourself!” she ordered. “I’ll get you a fresh change of clothes.”

When he finally emerged, damp and indignant, she was downstairs, grouchily contemplating the amended investigation board over a mug of coffee. She ran a cool eye over him. “Do you need help with the stingers, or did you get them already?” Her bees patrolled the room, still more agitated than they should have been at this hour.

“Your bees are a menace, Watson.”

She turned back to the documents pinned to the wall. “Seems to me that if you had left my case well enough alone, not to mention shown some restraint about banging into my room in the middle of the night -- which is a live hive, I’ll remind you -- you’d be fine right now.”

Sherlock began some kind of protest, but was interrupted by his phone.

“Five times in the last fifteen minutes,” Joan supplied.

Sherlock snatched it up and looked at it, then tossed it back down in disgust. _“Randy,”_ he said. “I don’t have time for this, I have--”

“--all the time in the world for your sponsee,” Joan finished for him. At his glower, she continued, “I’ve got this, Sherlock. It’s a years’-cold case, there’s no urgency here. And the only reason you’re burning to work on it right now is because I’ve already gotten a lead on it. If I wasn’t capable of working this case, it’d still be sitting in your trunk--”

“Your trunk,” Sherlock corrected.

She cast him a sideways glance.

 _“Your_ trunk,” he insisted, twitching with impatience. “I gave it to you.”

She flicked her eyebrows and turned back to the board. “Go see to your sponsee, Sherlock. Or not, I don’t care, he’s your sponsee, not mine. Just stop pissing off my bees.”

When he came back three hours later, she had successfully acquired the next lead in the case, and he was carrying a large bouquet of acacia and lavender.

“Not for you,” he said, when her brows threatened to reach her hairline. “For the bees.” He gestured vaguely at the stairs.

“Of course,” she said. “Just… leave them in our room, I guess.”

She turned back to the murder board, and he ran away up the stairs, three at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Acacia: SECRET LOVE (hahaha, see, I told you I was a good writer!)  
> Lavender: Serenity, grace, calmness. Also, bees just like it. They like it A LOT.


	6. Interlude

Joan came back to the brownstone after seventy-two hours spent chasing a blackmailer upstate, to discover that her bees had annotated her portrait with the words “SOME DETECTIVE” in bright orange. She would have worried that her bees were developing sarcasm along with language, except that they also had written “RADIANT” above Joan’s bed in pink.

Ms. Hudson, when Joan finally tracked her down, refused to divulge how she had gotten the bees to do it, or even admit that she had anything to do with it at all.

But when Joan climbed back up to her room-cum-hive, she could have sworn that the bees’ hum was downright smug.


	7. Chapter 5

If the younger Holmes brother had a tumultuous relationship with Joan’s _watsonia_ , the relationship the older Holmes brother had with them was abysmal.

“The maid let me in,” Mycroft explained one day, and then yelped and slapped the back of his neck. “Why is the house full of bees, Sherlock? Don’t tell me you think beehives are appropriate interior decoration now?”

“Her name is Ms. Hudson,” Sherlock corrected his brother.

“And the bees are mine, not Sherlock’s,” Joan said, reaching to restrain Mycroft’s hands from trying to swat at the bees. “And stop hitting yourself.”

“And contrary to your opinion, they’re gifted interior decorators, you should see what they did with Watson’s room. They have far more talent in a single ovipositor than you managed to display in the entirety of that snooze-fest you imposed on 221B.”

“Joan’s room?” Mycroft asked, with a horrified glance at Joan. The bees were continuing to buzz him. Mycroft jerked and thrashed with his head, trying to get away.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Joan muttered, and dragged Mycroft bodily from the brownstone, away from the immediate vicinity of her bees.

“Yes, that’s right, Joan’s room is full of _beeeeeeeeeees!”_ Sherlock shouted after his brother, his voice full of glee. “You won’t be having your nasty way with Watson here!”

Mycroft’s second visit to the brownstone went no better than the first. After Mycroft fled the building in bee-stung ignominy, Sherlock turned to Joan with a puff of pride. _“Euglossa watsonia_ are an excellent judge of character. I’ll be sure to put that in the species description.”

“Oh my god, Sherlock,” Joan snapped. “The bees are agitated because I’m tense, and I’m tense because I’m waiting for the next jerkish thing you’re going to do or say! It’s not about him, it’s about you being an asshole about my dating him!”

Sherlock’s glance at her was arch. “Beekeeping folklore recommends walking one’s suitors through an apiary to test their moral soundness. And mark well, Watson, while the methodological basis of folktales leaves much to be desired, there is often observational truth preserved in them.”

“Which was more than likely about whether someone bathed than anything else.”

Sherlock smirked. “Even I can bring myself to admit that one of my brother’s few virtues is regular showering, and yet witness!” He circled his hand in the air, indicating the general agitation of the bees. “Hm? You should listen to your bees, Watson.”

“Fine.” Joan put her hands in the air in disgust. “But you don’t get to have it both ways, Sherlock. If you want me to listen to the bees, then _you_ have to listen to them, too, and admit that I’m royalty.”

Sherlock’s face twisted. Joan smirked, waiting for him to back down or -- far more likely -- deflect with an insult.

“I concede that you are as royal as anyone in Scotland,” Sherlock finally ground out, and stalked from the room.

Joan stared after him, unable to parse the particulars of that. She had no idea of his opinions on the legitimacy of the Stuart claim to the throne -- let alone where Watsons had fit into that mess -- but she could guess from context that they were not favorable.

“Thank you for the lovely dinner,” Ms. Hudson said, fading in from wherever she had taken herself off to when Sherlock’s drama with Mycroft had abruptly erupted.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Joan began, abruptly recalling her duties as hostess, but Ms. Hudson waved the apology off.

“You’ve been witness to far more than your share of romantic tiffs from my end,” she said.

“Yes, but--”

“No buts!” she chided, leaning in for a hug. “That’s just the way it is.”

At the brownstone door, she turned back. “Oh, and I wouldn’t expect you to know this,” she said confidentially, “but the entire Windsor family is at Balmoral right now.”

Joan stared at her.

“He’s an anti-monarchist,” she finally said. Ms. Hudson lifted an eyebrow at her, and Joan shook her head in denial.  “Of course he is. He’s _Sherlock.”_

“Perhaps,” Ms. Hudson shrugged, “I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about it.” She leaned in again for one more hug. “Listen to your bees, Joan,” she whispered, and was gone.


	8. Chapter Six

The bees were accenting their pollen stores with the occasional cell of glitter when Joan Watson’s drone knocked three times on the hive wall.

It had been a quiet day in the hive. Two evenings earlier, there had been a raging fight downstairs between the drone and his brother, before the bees had taken offense at their noise and driven them both away. Since then, it had been quiet. The empress herself had also been absent these two days. The bees were somewhat anxious about her absence, as they always were when she was gone, and as always, they put their anxiety into their work. With luck, their current creation of pollen and glitter might persuade their empress to return more quickly and wander less often.

But three knocks on the hive wall… That hearkened to a race memory nearly as old as the DNA that _watsonia_ shared with their _mellifera_ forbears.  A few workers alit on Joan Watson’s drone, tasted the terror and anxiety on his skin, and brought the flavor back to their queens.

Queens, drones, and workers alike, all paused in their activity and attended to him.

“Your mistress, Joan Watson,” he began, before halting. He stepped into the center of the hive, carrying two large white pails with him, and tried again. “Your mistress, Joan Watson, has been kidnapped, and has been given only an hour left to live.” The thrum in the hive rose to a fever pitch. “My brother has betrayed us both. I know where the transfer is to take place, but I can’t... I have come to ask for your help.” He revolved slowly in the middle of the room, his eyes running over the long ridges of comb on the walls. “The queens, the queens,” he murmured. “Joan, why did I never teach you to mark your queens??”

 _Here I am,_ buzzed one queen, and flew down into one of the buckets.

 _And I another,_ buzzed a second, taking up residence in the other.

They  called to their subjects with the sweet pheromones of an incipient swarm, and their workers responded to the calls by pouring into the buckets. A second pair of queens joined the first, calling to their workers as well, until both buckets were heavy with tens of pounds of bees. Sherlock secured both buckets with mesh lids, and whisked them downstairs and into the first cab he could find.

The cabbie eyed Sherlock’s cargo on the backseat balefully, before asking, “What’s in the buckets, bub?”

“Bees,” Sherlock answered unthinkingly, his mind miles ahead at the hand-off. The cabbie tromped on the brakes, jostling both buckets hard. They buzzed loudly in sudden outrage.

“They’re well-secured, they won’t bother you, I promise, just drive,” Sherlock pleaded, shoving hundred dollar bills through the partition’s window, and then following that with several more. “Please! The faster, the better!”

The cabbie glanced at the cash on the seat beside him, then reached behind him to slide the window shut. “Fine by me. They’ll be stinging you and not me,” he said, and stepped on the gas. Sherlock sat back and muttered his way through his contingency plans, the buckets vibrating angrily beside him.

Twenty minutes later, the taxi came to a stop. “Construction, can’t go no farther. And all the alternate routes will take you well beyond where you want to go, you’re going to have to hoof it from here.”

Sherlock tried to skirt the roadworks on foot, but two builders intercepted him, refusing to let him pass. Sherlock tried to win through with sheer obstinancy, but when the second builder turned out to also have a British accent, Sherlock finally looked at them both properly.

“MI6?” he asked. “But why--?”

They didn’t let him finish his question, but hurled him to the ground, shouting at him to know who he was and what business he was on.

“My partner is in there!” Sherlock howled. “My partner and my brother, and he’s going to muck it up and get her killed! You have to let me go! You have to help me!” When his interrogators refused to listen to his pleas, Sherlock lashed out, trying to kick the buckets over. He couldn’t reach them directly, but the tussle eventually toppled one bucket, and then the other. Both lids loosened when they fell. Sherlock rolled into a tight ball.

“What the bloody hell?” one of the MI6 agents asked, as the bees began to pour free.

 _“Find Joan!”_ Sherlock shouted.

The bees rose into the night, their bodies filling the air with shimmering gold in the bright lights of the roadworks.

 _“Everyone’s the enemy but Joan!”_ Sherlock shouted again. 

Then he tucked his face tight into his knees, and the MI6 agents began to scream.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here come the beevalry!

Joan heard them first, the low drone filtering through the night as from a distance, then gradually swelling to fill the air, audible to everyone. _Le Millieu_ looked confused, but Mycroft, already too familiar with Joan’s bees, went white. “Paint it black!” he shouted.

The only response were some not-so-distant screams. He repeated the order twice more, panic rising in his voice -- “Paint it black! For god’s sake, _paint it black!”_ \-- and then the bees descended with all the fury of disturbed hornets.

The rout was bloodless. Thugs dropped their guns, trying to protect their eyes from the bees. They tripped over vehicles and each other, wailing in French for God and their mothers. A few government SUVs came barrelling up into the chaos, their lights flashing, but their drivers also succumbed to the onslaught.

Joan stood still and calm through it all, recognizing her bees by the thrum of the air against her skin.

She had just started to wonder whose clothes she should best rifle to find something to cut the cable tie on her wrists, when she heard the crunch of running footsteps. She knew it was Sherlock before she turned to look: none other would have been permitted to remain standing in the angry hurricane of her bees.

“Watson,” he said, stopping just short of her. He was nearly breathless, his eyes wild. One cheek was abraded, tarred gravel ground deep into the cuts. _“Watson,”_ he said again.

She had just opened her mouth to reply, when Mycroft called out from somewhere on the ground, his voice strung tight with pain, “Good god, man, what is wrong with you? You were calling her ‘Joan’ not two hours ago!”

Sherlock whirled on his brother. “Watson has just had a traumatic experience, and I am trying to not traumatize her further!”

Joan shut her eyes, already exhausted by them both. She took strength from the whisper against her skin of the bees’ tight, protective orbits.  “My hands?” she asked hopefully.

Sherlock, ridiculously grateful for something concrete to do, dug in his pockets for a jack-knife and cut her free. After an awkward hesitation, he attempted to rub the circulation back into her hands. She permitted it for a few moments, then gently pushed him off. “I’m all right, Sherlock,” she told him. When he looked unsure, she met his eyes. “Truly. I’m all right.”

He finally nodded and backed away half a step. Joan looked about them.

The onslaught had been bloodless, but not hemolymphless: the ground was littered with dead bees. Every one had given their sting and life alike in defense of Joan. She sank to her knees -- Sherlock caught her arm on the way down, easing her to the ground -- and said a bee-prayer for them all.


	10. Chapter 8

The commander of the MI6 contingent had possessed enough common sense to remain in his SUV until the worst was over, and he took on the task of sorting out the bad guys from the morally-gray and politically-expedient guys. To Sherlock's everlasting disgust, Mycroft apparently fell into one of the latter two categories. Mycroft vouched for his brother to the scene commander, buying Sherlock space to focus on collecting Joan and her bees and getting them all back to the brownstone.

The buckets were far, far lighter on the way back than they had been on the way out. Three of the swarms had been easy enough to catch, the survivors clustering protectively around their queens. They docilely allowed themselves to be brushed into the buckets. But the surviving bees of the fourth swarm orbited Joan restlessly, unwilling or unable to settle.

“They’ve lost their queen,” Joan said.

“We need to get them back to their hive,” Sherlock said. “There may still be enough to raise a new queen from the existing brood.”

Joan nodded, her face drawn with fatigue.

“I’ll find us a car. We’ll see if James Bond has the nerve to drive in New York traffic with an agitated swarm of queenless bees in the back.”

Happily, James Bond took in stride the small swarm orbiting loosely about Joan, but his nerve broke when Joan stepped from the SUV in front of the brownstone, and the agitated bees who had been left behind descended upon her _en masse._ It took some exhausted pleading from Joan before they would allow the MI6 driver and physician into the building. Even then the insects were on a hair-trigger, looking for any provocation from MI6.

When Joan was finally medically cleared and able to retreat to her room, she found the bees’ latest project: “TERRIF” spelled out in red glitter against the background of a multicolored pollen store.

“I think you’re terrific, too,” she said, as she brushed her fingers over the letters. “And thank you for coming for me.” Her fingertips came away covered with red. “I don’t know if Ms. Hudson told you how that story ended, but I don’t want that for you. No more heroics, no more sacrificing yourselves for me. Your first job, your only job, is to get your colonies strong again. You hear me?”

The only response was three hundred bees dragging down the coverlet of her bed for her.

She shook her head. “You’re as stubborn as Sherlock, all of you.” But she crawled into her bed, and let the bees hum her to sleep.


	11. Chapter Nine

When Joan woke late the next afternoon, there was a tea tray (for herself) and a sugar-water feeder (for her bees) sitting outside her door. The tea was still warm in its cozy. She had only just finished her first cup when Sherlock appeared in her doorway with toast and eggs for her, and an extra pot of jam for the bees.

“You have a spycam in my room now?” Joan asked.

“The bees told me you were awake,” he replied, leaning down to place the tray across her lap.

She put out a hand to push it to the side, disliking the feeling of something pinning her down across her legs. The tray ended beside her, a barrier between them. “You’re on speaking terms with my bees now?”

“They react; I observe.” He had not looked away from her from the moment he had entered the room.

She grimaced into her tea. “Wonderful, an ‘I told you so.’”

He shook his head decisively. “No, of course not, you bear no responsibility for the course of events, Watson. But I wish to apologize for my own contributions: introducing you to Mycroft, pointing out _Le Millieu_ to you. If anything had happened to you--”

“They’ve begun building new queen cells,” Joan interrupted.

He paused, momentarily diverted from his course. When he opened his mouth again, she said over the top of him, “Can they recover? From such a large population crash?”

He blew out his breath in a frustrated sigh, and conceded to her change of topic. “If they were in conventional hives, I would be combining their colonies right now to give them the greatest chance of survival. As it is…” He indicated the combs, each an intricate work of art firmly affixed to the walls. “But your bees are remarkable, Watson. I have every hope that with proper support, they will make a full recovery. This morning I installed pollen traps on my _mellifera_ hives, to assist the _watsonia_ in feeding their existing broods.”

She looked up at him in alarm. “I don’t want your bees on my conscience, too.”

She could hear his teeth grind. “Your bees are _remarkable_ , Watson, and I would happily sacrifice my mellifera a hundred times over for their continued survival. I can not, _I will not,_ promise to not sacrifice my _mellifera_ for your _watsonia_. However,” he conceded, “you don’t need to be concerned in this case. Judicious use of pollen traps will not tax my colonies overmuch.” He sighed, noting the continuing anxiety in her face. “And if your bees need more than mine can supply, we can turn to other beekeepers for assistance.”

She looked at him steadily. “For yours as well as mine,” she urged.

He took a deep breath. “If needed.” At her continuing look, he nodded. “For mine as well as yours.”

They sat quietly for a while, together watching the _watsonia_ crawl over the pot of jam Sherlock had brought them.

“It will take time and work, Watson,” Sherlock said, “and there may be setbacks, but I will do everything I can to help your bees get through this. And I have every hope they will not only survive this, but go on to thrive.”

Joan nodded, watching her bees.

 

 


	12. Epilogue

Of course, Watson’s bees were not so depleted in numbers as to be unable to prevent Mycroft’s entry to the brownstone that same evening. Joan bumped into him at the end of the block -- that being as close as the bees would permit Mycroft to approach -- and when Mycroft tried to talk, she said to him, “No. Just _no.”_

And then her bees, pushed beyond endurance by the mycroftness of Mycroft, descended upon him and STUNG HIM TO DEATH. 


	13. WORD OF GOD

Well, okay, they didn’t _really_ sting him to death, because Joan is not a murderer and neither are her bees, and anyway, Mycroft isn’t worth the lives of so many of her bees. Also, if word had gotten out that a BRAND NEW SPECIES of bee had stung someone to death in New York City, it would have resulted in the authorities attempting to seize and destroy the hive, and none of us want _that._

But the bees did scare Mycroft GOOD AND PROPER, and he ran away down the street screaming, all the way back to England, and that was the last we ever saw of him.

Also, Joan totally didn’t sex with him again later, because if Joan learned one thing over the course of this story, it was to listen to her bees.

So Joan and Sherlock went on to solve the Cadogan-West murder together, and then they found the mole in MI6 together. (Because Sherlock may hate his brother, but he’s not going to just stand by and let him be murdered by MI6, either.) It turned out the mole was Sherlock and Mycroft’s evil oldest brother Sherringford. Unfortunately for him, Sherringford came around to the brownstone and tried to threaten Joan, so Joan’s bees STUNG HIM TO DEATH, this time for _reals_. Because there are scruffy, shady, unctuous, older brothers who aren’t good enough for Joan, and then there are evil, murdering, treasonous oldest brothers who weren’t even in canon in the first place, and that’s totally different. Also, the bees had evolved by then so that they didn’t have to rip their stingers and guts out every time they stung someone -- so no bees had to waste their lives on the fucker! -- and MI6 was going to have to cover up the whole thing up anyway, so no one had to worry about ANTHONY PLANAKIS, NYPD BEE DETECTIVE, coming around to lock up Joan’s bees.

Also, somewhere in there, Joan and Sherlock totally kissed. In the entire history of the world, there have only been six kisses rated as the most passionate, the most pure, but Joan and Sherlock’s kiss blew them all away. In fact, it was a million-gazillion times more romantic than that one time in canon that Watson got shot and Holmes lost his shit and threatened to kill everyone in that bar. Because ACTUAL KISSING instead of empty threats, and also TEXT instead of subtext. But mostly because Joan is the BEST WATSON EVER.

So Joan got to be EMPRESS OF THE BEES, and Sherlock got to be her royal consort, and everywhere they went -- unless they were incognito or in disguise for a case -- they each had their own personal honor guard of bees orbiting in a golden coronet around their head, just to make sure neither of them ever got kidnapped ever again.

Meanwhile, the bees made Joan’s room the PRETTIEST EVER, and everyone lived happily ever after always.

 

THE END

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Procession of the Species (Reading the Bees Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4226460) by [amindamazed (hophophop)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hophophop/pseuds/amindamazed)




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